Nightmares
by BereniceAndrea
Summary: Natasha is woken by awful nightmares. She does the one thing she's used to do; find Clint and seek comfort in him. An approach on their developing relationship throughout the years of Natasha's bad dreams.


**Disclaimer: Marvel characters do not belong to me. I just play with them. Fluffy one-shot.**

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Red. Everything was different shades of red. The walls. The dirty floor. The ceiling fan. The strapped chair used for tortures. Blood, Everywhere. Arterial splatter on every surface. Liters and liters of red hot thick blood. Not a window nearby; not a breeze to breathe.

That was all Natasha could see inside that suffocating little room. It smelled like metal and made her sick to her stomach. She was a prisoner in her own body, unable to move, standing frozenly in the middle of the hot, sickening red room, unable to find a way out. Her brain was receiving too much information all at once and couldn't process it through all her senses.

She could see; she could smell. She could taste the vomit coming up her throat; she could sense the touch of her fingerprints burning against her leg, although she didn't dare touch anything. Then came hearing. Her ears suddenly filled with panic screams coming from and adjoining room. Children's screams of pain, screams she was all too familiar with. The sound of torture induced pain. And it kept coming from every direction. Her eyes filled with tears; her heart with equal parts of fear and anger. She wanted to close her eyes and not feel; make it all go away magically, have none of that be real. But life didn't work like that.

Her body reacted out of instinct and she moved to find a door. She spotted one on the corner of the room and tried to open it to go aid the child –a little girl, she could tell- in distress. The door had been locked from the outside making her a prisoner as well. The little girl's screams and cries only became louder and louder until it was all Natasha could hear, and suddenly Natasha was the one sobbing and her own screams matched the little girl's as she realized they'd always been one and the same.

Natasha Romanoff woke up breathing shallowly, drenched in cold sweat as she sat up on the bed. She took a deep breath and swallowed hard until the beating of her own heart wasn't burning in her ears anymore. The wiped the tears that had rolled onto her cheeks and realized her hand was shaking. She closed it into a fist and turned the lamp on her nightstand on.

She got up and looked at the nearest watch; 3:15 am. Nightmares like that hadn't visited her in a while and it made her all the more vulnerable. She got out of her room in Avenger's tower and, still shaking a bit, got into the elevator to one of the top floors.

_The first night Clint Barton had brought Natasha Romanoff back to the USA with him; after he had failed to complete his mission and just end her life, she was assigned a room, much like the ones you'd find in an asylum; four padded walls, mattress with no springs ,a pile of SHIELD standard clothes and no furniture at all. She was on probation and so was Clint, actually; Fury's way of yelling fuck-you-Barton after actually having yelled fuck you Barton. Therefore, Clint had been assigned with her direct supervision until told otherwise, which meant we'd sit in an uncomfortable chair outside her prison all night._

_That was the first time he'd heard it. He was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of her screams and sobbing and he didn't understand what the hell was going on at first. He thought she was under attack somehow so he busted the door open and found the most vulnerable of creatures sitting on the mattress, breathing rapidly. He had tried to approach her but she calmed herself down and managed to look as deadly as she'd been so far just as fast, remaining an impenetrable wall for the rest of the night. Neither of them got any sleep. The next morning she acted like nothing had happened and he didn't bring it up._

The elevator's bell rang when it opened and it made her jump. She passed the messy living room and went straight to the bedroom. She knocked three times; no answer. She closed her eyes, tears threatening to fall and knocked again. She heard noise inside, something falling and somewhat of a curse.

Clint Barton opened the door, eyes half closed. When he saw her, crappy and scared as she looked, he fully awoke.

'Nat, what happened?' He asked with concern in his voice. She couldn't answer; words wouldn't leave her throat, so he hugged her.

_Next time he saw it they had just returned from an undercover assignment in some tropical country somewhere. They had been ordered to return to the Triskelion to get checked by medical. They weren't badly injured but they both had been patched up anyway; mostly bruises and a cut or two. _

_Their rooms in the building were next to each other. He heard the screams coming from her throat and run to her. She was still dreaming when he found her; he woke her up slowly. Tears wouldn't stop flowing and he hugged her, patting her back, trying his best to calm her down. When she finally did and he tried to get up to leave, she asked him to stay. He couldn't say no to her._

Tears began to fall. She closed her eyes and hugged him back tightly. She took a deep breath and composed herself. She let go of him and walked inside his bedroom.

Just like they'd done so many times over the years they had known each other, they lay on his bed, embracing one another in silence.

A few minutes had passed when he turned to face her, one hand behind her head and the other resting on her back. Both her hands sat comfortably on his chest, her body turned to his direction.

'What was it about?' He asked.

_He couldn't count the amount of times his partner had woken up in the middle of the night from a bad dream. After that first time in which they were close enough to let him comfort her, he'd always tried to stay close when spending the night in the building in case she needed him. It had happened a lot since. _

_Some days he could see it on her face and they both knew she'd be having nightmares that night. After a while, on especially bad days, he'd find himself going straight to her room at night. They'd fall asleep after a movie and if they were lucky, she'd avoid the bad dream altogether. But sometimes it wasn't enough and she'd wake up in his arms, screaming about painful memories and tricks her mind played on her instead. _

_After years of friendship there were no secrets between them. He knew her nightmares were mostly about what it had been done to her, and she wasn't always sure whether she had experienced a nightmare or a memory. It killed Clint to see her like that. Not only she had been through all of training, the brainwashing and the torture as a child and teenager, she'd find herself reliving it many years after. He was angry at himself and at the world for not being able to protect the woman he loved from her own mind and past._

She gave him a sad half smile but avoided looking at him when she spoke. 'I'm not sure.' She said.

'Was it a new dream?'

She looked at him. 'I think it was a memory.'

He clenched his jaw and kissed her forehead. 'Come here'. He opened his arms, a place she knew she fitted in perfectly and she gladly accepted the much needed invitation.

_After a particularly bad solo mission she had just come back from, she had showed up at Clint's door hurt, hungry, dirty and exhausted. He took one look at her and felt pain in the pit of his stomach. _

'_What happened?' he had asked_

_She didn't answer; she just walked in. There was no need for words, she was always welcomed there. He held her face with his hand and pulled her close for a hug. She didn't wanna let go but said nothing. _

'_Tasha, are you okay?' he insisted._

_She just smiled, although her eyes screamed in pain. 'Yeah, I just need a hot shower and I'll be good as knew' she lied._

_He led her to his small bathroom. He left a clean towel and one of his old shirts and sweat pants and gave her some space._

_She looked better when she came back; wearing his clothes, damp short red hair falling from her shoulders. She sat down on his couch, still exhausted and closed her eyes for a minute. When she opened them, a worried Clint Barton was holding a carton box full of Chinese food on her face. She took it from his hands and they shared its yummy content. When they were done, she leaned back and placed her hands on her stomach and the contact made her twitch in pain. Clint noticed._

'_Are you injured? Didn't you get medical?' _

_She denied it with her head. 'No, I came straight here.' _

'_Are you hurt?' he asked, worrying about her._

'_it's nothing' She scratched the area and her hand turned red._

'_Come on Tasha, let me see that.' Not a question, Romanoff. If Clint Barton is worried about you, it's was not nothing._

_She lifted his shirt from her body until a deep laceration was visible, hot thick blood gushing from it. _

'_Damn it.' Clint mouthed and rushed to his first aids kit to attend to her injury. He sewed her up and she didn't complain._

'_Nat, what's going on?' he asked when he was done. 'This isn't you. You're not this reckless. You're not…- what's going on?'_

_She looked at him with those penetrating green eyes. She exhaled and shared the truth. 'There were girls. In that warehouse, girls that couldn't be older than 12… Clint, there were so many and I couldn't-' she broke down in tears. He hugged her tightly._

'_I got 17 of them out before… He stabbed me and I wasn't strong enough to take the rest of them out' she started sobbing. 'I tried. I tried but I couldn't and he set the building on fire with them still in there.'_

'_Shhh, it's okay' he tried to calm her down. 'Shhh…'There were no words he could say at all. All he could do was listen and be there._

_It took a while for her to stop crying. They were sitting on the couch, his hands still around her, her head on the crook of his neck when she asked, 'Can I stay here tonight?' she looked up at him. 'Their faces. I can't stop seeing them.'_

_He nodded and took her to his bed, where she fell asleep in his arms. That night the nightmares were bad, but she was with him, so she didn't have to be afraid, he'd chase her bad dreams away._

That was the thing about them. After so many years, so many experiences together they didn't need words. They had their own silent language that only the two of them understood. They needed proximity to one another; they needed to feel loved, to feel they belong in the other's arms to know for sure that in the morning, everything would be alright. Words were overrated.

Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton fell asleep in each other's arms and didn't wake up until late the next morning. And just like every time they woke like this, everything was alright because they were together…


End file.
